"What Aristotle Taught Me About Happiness" by Eva Gregory

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What Aristotle Taught Me About Happiness

• Published on April 14, 2017

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Eva Gregory, CPCC

★Helping Spiritual Entrepreneurs ★Access ★Trust and ★Act →On Inner Guidance for →Business Success

Aristotle had more to say about happiness than any other philosopher before him. While he called it by a different name, eudaimonia, much of what he said is still relevant today.

See how a quick look at Aristotle’s thinking can help you lead a fuller and more enjoyable life.

What Aristotle Said About Happiness

1.     Pursue ultimate ends. We do a lot of things just so we can position ourselves to get something else. Obtaining wealth may symbolize security or luxury for us. Aristotle argues that happiness is the highest good because we value it for itself.

2.     Resist immediate gratification. Challenging activities are usually more rewarding than passive pleasures. It’s tempting to turn on the TV after a hard day at the office, but talking with friends or working on hobbies will probably make us feel better.

3.     Carve out time to reflect. Aristotle says the ability to reason is what makes humans unique. Consider your core values and how to honor them.

4.     Get moving. Put your thoughts into action. Aristotle provided a list of virtues that can guide us to attaining happiness.

The Table of Virtues

1.     Face your fears. Have the courage to be true to yourself. Venturing beyond your comfort zone can bring great rewards.

2.     Practice moderation. Temperance helps you to enjoy basic pleasures without going to extremes. Stop at one chocolate chip cookie.

3.     Spend wisely. Liberality is expressed by using resources wisely. Put your time and your income to good use. Prioritize your daily activities.

4.     Appreciate quality. You can still enjoy the good things in life. Magnificence is at work when you treat your friends to a dinner you can afford instead of being stingy or trying to impress people.

5.     Believe in yourself. You may be used to thinking of magnanimity as generosity. Here it means knowing your worth.

6.     Set goals. Pride can be a good thing when you tie it to your achievements and helping others. Direct your ambitions towards worthy causes.

7.     Cultivate patience. A good temper allows us to wait our turn graciously. Perseverance plays a big part in any success.

8.     Tell the truth. Level with yourself and others. You’ll gain a reputation for being trustworthy and avoid a lot of stress. Acknowledge when you make an error. Let your loved ones know how you really feel even when it seems awkward. It may lead to constructive discussions and closer relationships.

9.     Have a laugh. There’s a light side to Aristotle. He knew that wittiness draws people closer together and provides relief during difficult times. Look for the humor in situations like a long afternoon at your local Department of Motor Vehicles or your puppy picking out your most expensive shoes to chew up.

10. Treasure your friends. Aristotle viewed a complete friendship as one of the greatest goods because it combines pleasure and virtue. Appreciate your loved ones and wish all good things for them.

11. Display modesty. Humility helps us to recognize our limits and get along with others. It’s easier to grow and learn new things when you understand that everyone can teach you something beneficial.

12. Rejoice in other’s good fortune. Aristotle cautions us about avoiding envy or spitefulness when others get the things we want for ourselves. Congratulate a colleague for their recent success and you may be more likely to succeed soon yourself.

You can choose to live a happy life. Give Aristotle’s advice a try. Rely on your reasoning, love your friends, and practice virtue. Living up to your potential will bring you greater bliss.

About Eva

Eva Gregory is a mentor to spiritual entrepreneurs, coaches and holistic practitioners, Law of Attraction expert, speaker and author. Her passion is teaching spiritual entrepreneurs how to tap into their own inner guidance and merge it with the practical steps to create healthy sustainable businesses from a place of purpose, passion and prosperity. Get your FREE REPORT: “Massive Success For Spiritual Entrepreneurs” here. Learn more about how Eva can help you at www.EvaGregory.com.

"Inside the Kindergartner's Brain" by Hank Pellissier

(Courtesy of Great Schools)

Inside the kindergartner’s brain

What insights can neuroscience offer parents about the mind of a kindergartner?

by: Hank Pellissier | July 9, 2016

 Print article

"Let me do that! I’m all grown up now."

Kindergartners can be swollen with self-esteem, thanks to graduating from preschool into "big kid" school, where they mingle with older role models. Indeed, the kindergarten range of four-and-a-half to six years old is often bossy, belligerent, and boastful about newly-acquired motor skills like sprinting and monkey-bar tricks. The kindergarten brain also features many mental upgrades from a preschooler’s: superior memory, beefed-up attention span, a tighter grip on reality, improved self-control and social skills, and a firmer grasp of knowledge codes — i.e., numbers and the alphabet.

Even so, kindergartners are burdened and blessed with brain activity that’s wildly alien to adult intelligence. A five-year-old noodle has 100 billion brain cells (neurons) with 77 percent in the furiously-networking cerebral cortex — the zone that constructs language, math, memory, attention, and complex problem-solving. The neurons are maniacally sprouting dendrites, skinny octopus arms that slither out to receive data from up to 15,000 other cells, and axons that transmit information to other cells. Links between neurons — or synapses — build cognitive pathways that create every individual’s specialized "brain architecture" that allows them to comprehend, accumulate, and retain knowledge.

Harvard’s Center for the Developing Child notes, "early experiences in brain architecture make the early years of life [ages 0 to six years] a period of both great opportunity and great vulnerability for brain development." In other words, these are crucial years for building the foundation of "brain architecture" — a time when, as a parent and caregiver, you can have a significant impact on your child’s development. Kindergarten is also a critical year because you want your child to enjoy the educational process. How can you help your child navigate the new world of "grown up" expectations? Start by following the guidelines to come.

Talk, sing, and read

Talk, sing, and read books frequently to your kindergartner. Steady exposure to verbiage enables their cerebral cortex to develop strong neural circuitry for swift acquisition of language. Parents also would do well to be active listeners, asking open-ended questions that initiate thinking, such as, ‘If you could have any superpower in the world, what would it be?’ or, ‘What do you like most about going to the beach?’ Plus, explain how things work, use high-level vocabulary, encourage writing, and include your kindergartner in adult conversations. Kindergarten is an optimal year for introducing new words and a second language. Children’s book author Tomi Ungerer recently opined in the New York Times that, "between the ages of three and seven, children can learn three languages a year. If you’re not teaching them another language, you can always develop their vocabulary."

Reading help in kindergarten

Learning to read by "sounding out" letters in words is difficult for many kindergartners, even if their brain’s auditory development is excellent. One reason, notes Jeannine Herron, Ph.D., author of Making Speech Visible, is that memorizing the alphabet is misleading, because letter titles — A, B, C, etc. — don’t sound precisely like the sounds they represent. For example, the letter G has a J sound, H is way off-base with its "AAACH" pronunciation, and all the vowels can be utilized with more than one sound. This difficulty delays thousands of struggling readers. To circumvent this, Herron recommends teaching kindergartners to "pay attention to what their mouth is doing" when they learn phonemes.

Be gentle in kindergarten

For their learning ability to flourish, kindergartners need to feel safe and confident. A 2007 Stanford University study indicates that traumatic stress and fear can release toxic levels of the hormone cortisol; this can destroy neurons in the hippocampus, a region that supports factual and episodic memory. To protect your kindergartner’s self-assurance, give your child positive, loving, and encouraging feedback. Minimize reprimands, avoid unnecessary power struggles, and don’t use shouting or spanking in discipline. Express sympathy if they’re afraid of nightmares or the dark, and be patient about bed-wetting: Many children continue enuresis until age seven or longer.

Tiny inventors

Find a great elementary school for your child with a kindergarten teacher who comprehends the learning process at this age. Kindergarten brains thrive on exploring, playing, inventing, experimenting, constructing, and tinkering with three-dimensional materials. Their brains actually grow in response to novelty and challenge because curiosity secretes dopamine, a chemical that stimulates the dendrite expansion that wires the brain. For these reasons, it’s worth finding a class where children’s physical activity is encouraged and teachers truly understand the developmental needs of the age group. Your child’s kindergarten teacher also needs to be encouraging, understanding, and supportive to help him learn best. At this age, the big academic topics they need to master — reading and math, most notably — should be presented as fun, with minimal and enjoyable homework.

Stimulate the senses

Experiences this year will have a huge impact on your kindergartner’s absorbent brain. When not in school, children benefit greatly from activities that pique their curiosity. Expose your child to hands-on interaction with three-dimensional materials and take them on sensory-rich outings to festivals, zoos, museums, concerts, and outdoor natural areas.

Let’s focus in kindergarten

A kindergartner’s attention span is about five to15 minutes long. To bolster your child’s concentration level, engage her in activities that require focus, like meditation and board games. Teaching self-control and delayed gratification will also help your child academically: The correlation between self-control and GPA is twice as high as the correlation for IQ and GPA. You can also boost your child’s patience by modeling it in your own behavior — by speaking and acting calmly. Finally, limit TV watching to an hour per day — studies suggest TV over-stimulates young children’s neurological systems, resulting in hyperactivity and shortened attention spans.

Body building in kindergarten

Ideally, kindergartners should have at least 30 minutes a day to run and play outside. Columbia University research discovered that exercise builds brain cells in the dentate gyrus. According to John Ratey, MD, author of Spark, exercise elevates a chemical he dubs "Miracle-Gro for the brain" because it builds the brain’s infrastructure. Full-body exercises like soccer, swimming, gymnastics, and dance are recommended. Plus, for optimal brain growth, feed your child a balanced, nutritious variety of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, dairy, and meat, and limit ingestion of candy, cookies, fruit juice, and sugary, salty junk food. Egg yolk, fatty meat, and soybeans contain choline, the building block for the neurotransmitter acetylocholine, which is crucial in memory function. (Learn more about healthy brain foods kids love.) 

Tuning up in kindergarten

Expose your children to music, and if they show any aptitude, get them an instrument. Play structured, melodic music for them and sing songs. UC Irvine’s Gordon Shaw gave 19 children piano or singing lessons for eight months, and found that the kids demonstrated dramatic improvement in spatial reasoning. Shaw, who regards music as "a window into higher brain function," has published numerous studies indicating that children who study music are ahead of their peers in math.

The True Meaning Of Unconditional Love

Article from: A CONSCIOUS RETHINk

Some people regard unconditional love as pure fantasy, a myth that has been shared and searched for throughout human history. Others believe that it is not only real, but the most real thing there is.

This article will suggest that it is absolutely possible to love unconditionally, but that many people simply misunderstand what it means to do so.

We’ll explore the themes and weigh up the points of debate to try and give a clear explanation of love in its unconditional form.

Unconditional = Selfless

The literal meaning of the word unconditional is without conditions, but how does this translate into reality? To answer this, you have to first consider what conditional love is.

Conditional love is an attachment to and feeling for someone that depends on them behaving in a certain way. At its heart is the premise that the person giving the love (the lover) does so because they get something back in return – namely a response from the person receiving the love (the beloved) that meets their expectations.

More accurately, it is the love that relies upon the beloved NOT acting in a way that the lover finds unacceptable or intolerable.

Unconditional love, on the other hand, exists in the absence of any benefit for the lover. It transcends all behavior and is in no way reliant upon any form of reciprocation.

It is completely and utterly selfless. It cannot be given in as much as it flows without effort from one’s heart rather than coming consciously from one’s mind.

There is nothing that can stand in the way of unconditional love.

Wishing The Best For The Beloved

With selflessness comes the ultimate desire to see the beloved flourish and find contentment. It doesn’t have to involve any actions on the part of the lover, but it often does. Sometimes it even involves a level of personal sacrifice.

It is the driving force that spurs you on to do whatever you can to help your beloved become the best version of themselves.

It First Requires Self-love

In order to love someone unconditionally, you must start by loving yourself the same way. You must learn to accept who you are without seeking to change. If you insist that change is necessary, you are putting conditions on the love you have for yourself. This is not to say that change will not take place, but it will be natural, unforced, and unlooked for.

Only when you stop chasing changes in yourself can you begin to love others without their needing to change. It is then that love can be deemed unconditional.

Believing In The Good That One Possesses

When love is given without condition, it is a sign that you are able to see the very worst in someone and yet still believe that they are worthy of your compassion. It is the part of you that forgives the seemingly unforgivable when no one else is able to.

Unconditional love does not judge and it does not give up on those whom society may deem as immoral or evil. It is the conviction to see beyond a person’s outward flaws to focus, instead, on the inner being that some may call a soul.

It Can’t Be Said, Only Felt

The first misconception about unconditional love is that you can declare it to someone. There is a chance that you are experiencing it, but you may also be feeling something very close to it, but in some way lacking.

There is no way to predict how you may react to a person in a given set of circumstances. You may find that there are limits to your love that you were simply unaware of previously.

Because of the innate uncertainty of the future, unconditional love can exist only as a feeling and not as a mental or verbal concept (this article itself can by no means describe the very essence of it).

You will never know for sure whether what you feel is unconditional love, but this in no way disproves its existence.

A Relationship Does Not Have To Be Unconditional Too

Another common misunderstanding is the belief that unconditional love requires you to accept whatever your beloved does to you. It is, however, possible for the relationship to have various conditions upon it, but for the love to have none.

You can make a choice to end a relationship because it involves abuse or because your beloved has acted in a way that you cannot stomach. This does not have to mean the end of your love for them.It is quite possible to still wish the best for them, see the good in them, and accept them as they are – the properties of unconditional love described above. It may be that you will love them from a distance rather than get caught up in a situation that could be self-destructive.

Relationships are mere partnerships between two people. A relationship is not a feeling – it is not love of any kind – it is merely the vessel in which love can be housed. Should the partnership become unsustainable, the vessel can break, but the love does not always cease to be; it can be moved outside of the relationship and exist by itself.

This is because unconditional love has no basis in the actions and behaviors of the beloved. Your lives may end up taking utterly different paths to the point where a relationship becomes impossible, but your love for them does not diminish.

You Can Experience Negative Emotions At The Same Time

Unconditional love does not mean that you feel warmth and affection towards your beloved at all times; you are human after all. You can be angry at them, frustrated with them, and hurt by them while still loving them.

Having arguments does not diminish the love that comes truly free of conditions. Just as the waves atop an ocean do not impact the depths below, the natural highs and lows of a relationship cannot penetrate deep enough to affect the underlying feeling.

Unconditional Love From A Spiritual Perspective

Many religions and spiritual practices involve the concept of non-duality and this can be another source of unconditional love. When you feel separate from others, you have a choice as to whether or not you love them, but if you look upon your neighbor as you would look upon yourself, love is almost inevitable.

If you live free from the mental barriers that exist in the majority of people and experience the universe and everything in it as being of you, why would you choose anything other than love? While rare, this type of unconditional love does exist in some people.

There Should Be No Guilt Where It Is Lacking

You may feel it towards another or you may not, but the absence of unconditional love is not something to feel guilty about.

As much as you may wish to feel this way and rationally see reasons for doing so, it cannot be willed into being. This type of love cannot be wished for, chased, or accumulated; it can only be.

It may hurt to realize that your love for another has conditions, but this is not something you can control. So do not beat yourself up when your love for someone fades, if it was meant to keep burning, it would have done.